The Clog Dance – Royal Ballet

Men in bonnets! Clogs! Slapstick! Just another night at the ballet. La fille mal gardée at the Royal Ballet to be precise. The year of its premiere, 1789, was somewhat overtaken by a little something that would later become known as the French Revolution, but the tortoise approach worked. 226 years later, the ballet is standard rep.

And that Napoleon character? After an initial promising start, things didn’t quite go to plan. Now, his name has become shorthand for a raging megalomaniac compensating for his (alleged, granted) physical shortcomings by engaging in even more megalomaniacal raging.